Why Pure Love Botanicals?
WHY PURE LOVE BOTANICALS?
My Founder’s Journey.
First, we are keeping The Little Herb Shoppe you’ve known and trusted since 2011 right here! Right along with the Organic herbal products you’ve come to rely on for nourishment and healing!
Welcome to The Little Herb Shoppe’s new website and our new platform for classes, retreats and programs in Pure Love Botanicals.
People regularly ask me “How did you get into herbs, healing?” I’ve been studying herbs since the early 90’s on and off. Later, in 2007, my mother passed from cancer. After that, I was recovering from so health issues, using herbs to heal… after all of that, it didn’t make much sense for me to do anything else! So I packed my bags from Cape Cod and followed an urge to head north… Deeper rootedness in the mountains of the north country.
I rented our location on main street in beautiful Littleton, NH. As the founder of a small business, there were many times I thought I’d close, just let it all go, do anything but work this hard. That much more so while going through life challenges, the ‘covid’ years… that made running an herb shop almost impossible. There are many tests when you walk in the light.
As cliche as it may sound, this truly is a labor of love.
And year after year, our customers kept us here. Some of you have become like family. Others visit annually and still our locals close and dear….
I and my team are here for you for the long haul.
We’ve transformed the shop these past 3 years. We’ve been able to do that because we understand the sacredness of the many roles required to work here. An apothecary is by nature a heart-based business, a living being in many ways.
On the practical level, ours has evolved to finally pay a living wage to its employees (including myself), while maintaining a 65 acre off grid botanical and wild life sanctuary as an act of reciprocity to the plants, fungi, trees, the green nation.
I also founded a non-profit called the Burdock Fund.. more on that in another blog post!
Our customers are partners. The herbs and herbal medicine you purchase from our apothecary is in some way an even higher quality beyond the organic sustainably sourced oils & herbs we use, because intention is a powerful thing.
So while I may sell the shop to the next right person one day, for now, we’re not going anywhere!
What is healing?
The common denominator between all of us is that we’re all in this journey called life, with its ups and downs, and we each get to figure out what that healing means for us.
Many times a diagnosis is a wake up call for our lives. Through that, we come to Understand what is required for us to heal. That is the journey. Perhaps it’s a chronic condition, or a host of symptoms that no one can ultimately figure out for you. That is the healing process.
You are more than a collection of symptoms. Specialists divide up the body so much, that we forget to treat ourselves as whole. Because that chronic pain in the bottom of your foot may just be related to the tension you hold in your back. And that could be related to stress about something unresolved…
While modern medicine has its place, and can be miraculous, the number of pharmaceuticals people ingest is shocking and can take a huge toll on our bodies and minds. We only have to sit through one television show to see that most of the commercials are loaded with pharmaceuticals … and the ‘normalizing’ of a diseased way of life.
Herbs give us freedom of health. This is one of our missions at The Little Herb Shoppe and through Pure Love botanicals education.
When you’re not well, its easy to become overwhelmed, scared, anxious and to not know where to turn. People come out of the woodwork with advice, and that ‘their way or method, will help you’ And it might, for a bit. But what do you do when months or years later you still have the same or worse symptoms or those same feelings. You are your greatest adventure.
Our circumstances are often a mirror of our internal life. There is no blaming anyone who is sick, but with a physical or mental illness, that is an invitation to explore what is going on inside. Exploring what’s under the surface and what we’re often unaware of, the subconsciousness, the part of us that truly runs the show.
I once had a staff who meaning well, posted a Louise Hay quote about how a lung issue means “the Inability to take in life…. Not feeling worthy of living life fully.” A mother whose child had died of cystic fibrosis (a lung scarring issue) replied to that saying her daughter was in no way to blame. Of course she wasn’t. NO one was. And we edited that post to reflect that.
What that teaches us is that life, disease and healing are complicated. And I’ve found repeatedly in my 25 years of learning many different areas of healing work, that the body is constantly giving us messages. Hints of things such as a situation in our lives or in our past that we need to heal. The body tells us what we are not aware of.
There is so much to this.. Let me give you an example in my own life.
When my mother died, I got a pneumonia that would not clear up, even after 3 separate rounds of anti-biotics, bed rest, nothing.
Herbs helped me physically of course, and probably saved my life. But I believe they also helped me get enough of my energy back to ‘feel’ or to ‘understand’ the message from my lungs more deeply.
I’d been holding onto grief, heartache, guilt around my mother’s death. Common feelings during the passing of a parent. Not only for her death, I would come to see I was holding on to all the unhealed things in my life. And hers. The unhealed aspects of her lineage, her mother’s mother…. I healed more and more as I understood that that this a multi-faceted journey. Hence the blog cover picture of boneset – more about that in another blog post too!
I know that all of you have your own healing journeys and sacred stories, perhaps not yet written.
The realms of faith, prayer, herbalism, shamanism, whatever calls to you. I work with all of these energies and believe the plants do as well, and that they can help us tap into a deeper awareness to help us heal.
Our culture often forgets to honor nature, animals, each other, ourselves… Treating your body as the sacred temple it is is a powerful and simple place to start.
SO. As we use plants to help us, we start taking care of them so they don’t become more endangered. The Little Herb Shoppe, Pure Love Botanicals, and the Lakota Wildlife & Botanical Sanctuary are here to help guide you along the way.
Thanks for sharing time here with me on this auspicious new moon. We love making herbal remedies for you and teaching you how to use them.
If my journey resonates with you, join me at our intimate Equinox Retreat in Vermont on 9/23 and my Retreat on Cape Cod on 10/14. Spaces are limited. Come transform you anxiety and your deepest pain into your well-being!
My welcome gift to all of you is a 10% discount for all purchases today through Friday 9/22.
And you can read more ABOUT US and the apothecary here! We hope you enjoy the new website. Drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you.
One request, if you’ve used our products and loved them, I’d appreciate if you’d leave a review on this new website. It would help us a great deal! Thank you!
Welcome to Pure Love Botanicals,
Kim
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